Building the infrastructure that moves money at Google, Stripe, and beyond.
01 · About
I'm a Senior Software Engineer based in Los Angeles with 12+ years building the distributed systems that power modern fintech at scale. I've spent my career at the intersection of backend infrastructure and product engineering, architecting the microservices that route billions in payments at Google, scaling the billing APIs that power Stripe's subscription economy, and now applying AI agent frameworks to make fraud analysts dramatically more effective.
I care deeply about systems that are reliable, observable, and fast. My default is to over-engineer for correctness and under-engineer for complexity. The best code is the code you never have to debug at 2am.
$ whoami
steve_zhang
$ experience --years
12+ years
$ companies --notable
Google · Stripe · Claros
$ currently
Senior SWE @ Google Pay
Building AI-powered fraud tooling
$ education
MIT B.S. Computer Science
$ 02 · Career
Feb 2019 – Present
Senior Software Engineer · Google Pay / Google Wallet
Scaling payments infrastructure handling billions of daily transactions across fraud detection, Kubernetes orchestration, and AI-powered analyst tooling.
Aug 2016 – Jan 2019
Software Engineer · Payments Platform
Scaled billing and invoicing REST APIs processing millions of subscription events daily at 99.95% uptime.
Earlier
Software Engineer
Architected multi-tenant SaaS REST APIs and analytics dashboards serving enterprise clients.
B.S. Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
03 · Selected Work
A selection of high-impact systems I've designed, built, and operated at scale.
End-to-end fraud investigation platform with React/TypeScript frontend and Python/FastAPI backend, giving analysts real-time case visibility across payment systems.
Refactored monolithic payment systems into Go-based microservices on GKE, with gRPC contracts and full observability.
LangGraph multi-agent orchestration behind FastAPI REST endpoints, integrating fraud scoring, case enrichment, and decision-recording services.
Pub/Sub & Kafka pipeline with event sourcing for transaction state, built to absorb traffic spikes with sub-second propagation.
Owned core billing and invoicing REST APIs, processing millions of subscription events daily through resilient async pipelines.
Designed multi-tenant analytics REST APIs and dashboards with per-tenant theming and granular access controls.
04 — Toolbox
05 — Impact
Years Engineering
Tier-1 Companies
Fraud Review Reduced
Throughput Scaled
06 · Testimonials
From colleagues and collaborators.
“Steve has a rare ability to take ambiguous, sprawling infrastructure problems and turn them into clean, well-scoped engineering plans. His work on our microservices migration was one of the highest-leverage projects the Wallet team shipped that year.”
Senior Engineering Manager
Google Pay
“One of the strongest engineers I've worked with, not just technically, but in terms of ownership. Steve shipped the fraud dashboard end-to-end with minimal hand-holding and immediately became the team's go-to for anything React + distributed systems.”
Staff Software Engineer
Google Wallet
“Steve leveled up our entire backend during his time at Stripe. His instinct for API design and async pipelines saved us from at least three major reliability incidents. Genuinely one of the best hires we made.”
Engineering Lead
Stripe Payments
08 — Contact
Open to senior engineering roles, technical advisory, and interesting collaborations.